President Bush's hair-splitting decision on stem cell research requires amplification of my previous remarks. In "Why God Favors Stem Cell Research," I noted the Grand Designer's haphazard treatment of blastocysts (i.e., a huge percentage of them are washed away in cosmic oblivion before attaching to the womb) and pointed out the Vatican's cluelessness regarding their eternal fate (i.e., no salvation without baptism of some sort).

In light of this metaphysical and theological evidence, it made no sense to a reasonable man like me to worry about experimentation. If God has treated his concepti so cavalierly and if the Church has abandoned them after death, how important could they be? Controlling for sentimentalism, blastocysts are pretty cheap in the scheme of evolution. End of story.

The irony rolled on last week when the most prolific political executioner of 20th century America gave a lecture on the value of life. Pardon moi if Carla Faye Tucker came to mind when President Bush declared:"I also believe that human life is a sacred gift from our creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life and believe, as your president, I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world."

The President fairly presented the position in favor of stem cell research--e.g., frozen blastocysts are neither embryos, nor individuals but merely clusters of cells destined to be destroyed anyway. However, his bias showed in his uncritical embrace of non-biological rebuttals: e.g.,"Others will argue that there's no such thing as an excess of life. And the fact that a living being is going to die does not justify experimenting on it or exploiting it as a natural resource."

Oh really? As Darwin observed, the essence of biology is excess."A struggle for existence inevitably flows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase," he wrote in The Origin of the Species."There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increased at so a high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair ... heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or the old, in every generation or at recurrent intervals."

Of course, the"going to die" fact does not vindicate human experimentation. All living beings die. What this gambit leaves out is that frozen blastocysts are never going to be born. They are stuck in the on-deck circle of life with no chance of getting to the plate. Squeezed by the Pope and other Talibans who prefer Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and paralysis to studying the curative potential of permanently orphaned fertilized eggs, the President chose the coward's way out. Testing the existing cell lines of already destroyed ova, si! But not one federal dime for work on living ones!

Despite the dead egg loophole and appearance of an even hand, the President is firmly on the side of the Talibans. If none of the current stem cell lines bear fruit, he is stuck with his prayerful ban on future federal funding.

The President's new and misnamed Council on Bioethics will undoubtedly provide him with cover. I say misnamed because its chairman, Leon Richmond Kass, seems more moralist than ethicist. Check the language in his quote to the New York Times (August 10):"And with the help of the council, I hope to enable the American people and the president to understand the moral significane of the issues before us, and to make it more likely that we will decide wisely and well." Dr. Kass followed up in similar terms on PBS's"Newshour."

You do not have to be a philosophe to cringe at mixing morality and biology. Look at the mess Christianity has made of masturbation, homosexuality, and group sex. (Concerning the latter, as you may know, I am reputed to have said,"Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.")

I wrote about the useless speculations of religion regarding the origin of life in my entry on the soul in The Philosophical Disctionary. The more things change, the more they remain the same. See if you agree:

Thus the soul was generally taken for the origin and the cause of life, for life itself. … There is the eternal object of the disputes of mankind; I say eternal object; for not having any first notion from which we can descend in this examination, we can only rest forever in a labyrinth of doubt and feeble conjecture. We have not the smallest step where we may place a foot in order to reach the most superficial knowledge of what makes us live and of what makes us think. How should we have? We should have had to see life and thought enter a body. … We dare question whether the soul is" Spirit" or" matter" ; if it is created before us, if it issues from nonexistence at our birth, if after animating us for one day on earth, it lives after us into eternity. These questions appear sublime; what are they? Questions of blind men saying to other blind men-" What is light?"